Night Flight: Why European Bat Folklore Feels Like a Tarot Shadow Card
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I’ve been trying to work through bat symbolism in European folklore, and I keep hitting a wall. From what I’ve seen, bats show up in connection with night, death, omens, and sometimes transformation, but I’m not sure how to separate regional traditions from later literary embellishment.
Has anyone noticed a consistent symbolic logic across different European cultures? I’m particularly interested in whether the fear of bats was mostly practical—because they’re nocturnal and hard to see—or if it was tied to older ideas about thresholds, the unseen, or the boundary between life and death.
Also, do you think Christian interpretations later reshaped the older folk meanings, or did they coexist? Any examples from specific regions would help me avoid overgeneralizing.
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